Thinking of buying a new inkjet printer?
Friday, August 31st, 2007Thinking of buying a new inkjet printer?
Recently my trusty old Epson R300 started to play up, so I thought it was time for a new printer. Obviously I wanted a printer that did everything that my R300 did as I had got used to its functionality. I looked around and was a little bemused by the choice on offer. However, working in the ink industry I knew to steer clear of certain manufacturers due to the running costs, as my kids are quite happy to print anything and everything that appears on the screen without any thought for the cost of the ink!
This in mind, I whittled down the choice to Epson, Canon or Brother as I know the ink is fairly reasonable for these manufacturers, also that third party ink is readily available. From my knowledge I also decided to keep away from tri-colour cartridges. This is because once you have used up one of the colours, the other two are wasted.
Before the R300 I had an older Canon, the Pixma IP1500 and was always very pleased with the results it gave, in fact I had given it to my father and it is still printing superbly years later! My mind was made up then I was going with Canon, the only issue was which one?
The are many to choose from but the Pixma range is by far the best for home use, as they are reasonably priced, have lots of features and print superb colour photos quickly.
I settled on the Pixma IP4300, I wanted to get IP4200 but found out that it is now obsolete. I had heard a lot of good things about the IP4200, but the IP4300 is an upgraded version.
I am so impressed with the printer I wanted to share my findings.
The printer is neat looking and was slightly smaller than the Epson R300. The Canon Pixma IP4300 takes individual ink cartridges, CLI8-BK, CLI8-C, CLI8-M, CLI8-Y and PGI-5BK which is a pigmented ink cartridge, so when one colour runs out you can simply replace it. There are also alternative cartridges for this printer, the first require you to take out the chip from your old cartridge and put it in the replacement versions or if that puts you off, there is a new system from Armor. This system comprises of an adaptor which sits inside the print head and then you put in the replacement cartridges into the adaptor. Both these options can save you a considerable amount of money.
I picked it up for around £50.00 which I think is good value, especially when you see what it can do. I had not really read all the information on this printer but when I did I was surprised to see that it can print a 6×4 full colour photo in 36 seconds, my old R300 took 2 minutes for the same picture. The Canon can also print a full colour A4 picture in under 2minutes wow! On top of this it is whisper quiet and the output is superb, this is mainly down to the 1 picoltire droplet size (picolitre’s are basically the measurement used for the size of the droplets, the smaller the droplet size the sharper the image with no obvious dots when you look closely) as opposed to the R300 droplet size of 3 picolitre’s. There is clear difference in image clarity when put side by side. The smaller droplet size also means that the printer uses less ink when printing therefore being more economical to run
I then tried out the text quality, again I was very impressed. In draft mode the pages literally fly out of the printer at high speed but although it was in draft mode the text was still clear and sharp. In normal mode the quality was comparable to laser output and would be more than acceptable for office use.
The Canon also comes with two paper trays, which is very useful. I keep A4 plain paper in one and use the other for photo paper, the printer also has a built in duplex unit which basically prints on both side of the paper without the need to take the sheet out and reinsert, amazing! Duplexing is normally saved for much more expensive laser printers.
If all this was not enough the Canon Pixma IP4300 also prints onto printable CD’s and DVD’s by using the special tray, one good thing here is that when printing CD’s and DVD’s the tray does not come out of the back of the machine like the R300, meaning it needs less space.
One thing I can say is that I found that using the Canon software that comes with the printer produced better results when printing photos than using the windows default option as the output was not as vivid, this was also the case for the R300.
To summarise I cannot fault this printer, it was reasonably priced, it is fast, quiet, gives excellent quality prints on plain white paper, photo paper or disc, it is cheap to run, easy to use and there is the built in duplex function.
If you are thinking of buying a new multipurpose inkjet printer for home or small office, I recommend you consider the Canon Pixma IP4300 printer, you won’t be disappointed.
